Strategic Puzzle Shifts in Mideast

Uprisings Change Paradigm That Guided Policy Makers for Past 20 Years

By

Bill Spindle And

Chip Cummins

Updated Feb. 19, 2011 12:01 a.m. ET

For more than two decades, the Middle East fell easily into neat strategic pieces like a puzzle: A rock-solid peace treaty tied Egypt and Jordan to Israel; stable, pro-U.S. monarchies lined the length of the Persian Gulf oil channels; autocratic governments across North Africa seemed unshakable.

Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, along with the dozens of emboldened protests they have inspired in countries across the region, have irrevocably altered those accepted truths. Each has been cast into doubt, if not overturned, in the past few weeks of historic turmoil. In their place, policy makers and the region's leaders have suddenly come face-to-face with messy realities beneath the surface of those sweeping geostrategic calculations.

Mideast Mosaic

Long festering economic problems are coming home to roost in the region. Youthful populations are demanding voices in their nations' futures. In a fast-moving age of satellite television, the Internet and its social media offshoots, dealing with those challenges hasn't gone smoothly. And on top of it all, one of the most powerful players on the regional stage, Egypt, has been sidelined for the foreseeable future.

In short, the real Middle East is bursting through the paradigm that has guided policy makers and regional leaders for decades. Key countries are suddenly being pulled inward and away from each other, and that could rule out the sort of sweeping formulas that have worked in the past.

"They're all coming to sensitive transitions. Can the U.S. inject enough commonality of purpose? It's going to be very difficult," said Emile Hokayem, a Bahrain-based Middle East analyst with the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

A tour of some of the current regional hot spots illustrates the underlying reasons why unrest is spreading across the Middle East:

• In the Gulf, Bahrain's efforts to expand freedoms and give its young population more of a voice in governance have backfired badly, resulting in on-again, off-again crackdowns by the regime and political boycotts and sometimes violent demonstrations by the opposition. That doesn't bode well for far more tentative attempts by Saudi Arabia to inject a measure of political participation into its governing systems.

• Jordan is struggling to balance the constituencies crucial to the long-term survival of King Abdullah II's monarchy. But balance has been harder to achieve as economic reform—reducing the size of the government and privatizing much of the economy—threatens to help some groups more than others. Amid the recent regional turmoil, King Abdullah has reversed course, raising public-sector salaries and expanding the number of government jobs. But that's sure to further hamstring the economy and add to the fiscal strain on a government already $20 billion in debt.

• In Yemen, staggering population growth has helped to transform the usual pattern of protests in the country into something far more volatile—a youth rebellion—as thousands of young protesters have ignored the established opposition parties' calls to stand down after President Ali Abdullah Saleh offered concessions.

• And in Libya, more than four decades of violent political repression have opened a fresh seam of anger among residents of the eastern provinces. That is despite economic liberalization by longtime leader Col. Moammar Gadhafi and a dramatic diplomatic thaw between Tripoli and the rest of the world recently; and an oil-price bonanza that has spurred an explosion of infrastructure projects in the capital, Tripoli.

The jigsaw puzzle that is the modern Middle East was created by England and France during and after World War I, when the two leading Western colonial powers secretly cut deals and swapped territories as they partitioned the remains of the collapsed Ottoman Empire.

Additional layers of the current Middle East security framework fell in place in the 1970s, when the British completed a long, slow-motion withdrawal from the region by leaving the Persian Gulf to the U.S. as a protectorate. The decade closed with Camp David, where Egypt and Israel hammered out a peace accord, which Jordan eventually followed to make peace with Israel. The accords, sealed with billions in annual U.S. aid, became the touchstone of U.S. power in the region.

That basic strategic reality stood pat for more than two decades. There were autocracies with regimes created by military men who had taken power by dumping monarchies or similar vestiges of the colonial era. That applied to Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Tunisia, Algeria and Libya. Monarchies remained in the Persian Gulf, Jordan and Morocco. Regimes survived by taking sides for or against the U.S.—with Syria and Iraq, until 2003, functioning as the anti-U.S. counterweight to the close alliance Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia forged with America.

One of the first pieces in the strategic Middle East jigsaw to fall away was Iraq. The U.S. overthrew quintessential strongman Saddam Hussein, helping to create the first modern Arab government to be dominated by Shiite Muslims. Mr. Hussein's departure also opened the door to new Iranian influence into the Arab world. And it was not lost on young Middle Easterners that this new reality, at least in some small part, sprung from credible popular elections.

Yet in the wider region not much changed. Autocrats, such as President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, became more autocratic. Gulf monarchies, such as Saudi Arabia, leaned more heavily on their traditional constituencies, especially the clerical establishment. President Bashar al Assad, who succeeded his father in Syria, backed off promises of reform and began behaving more like the elder Hafez, who ruled Syria with an iron fist for decades before his death in 2000.

Meanwhile, job creation stagnated across a region where young people were pouring into the labor market by the millions each year. Those long years of political and economic stagnation set the stage for the ruptures that have come in recent weeks.

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